2022 Ignyte Awards

Full list here, voting here through June 10th.

A few thoughts behind the cut. ( Read more... )

Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir. This is not a sequel to The Martian in fact - it's 100% a standalone - but it is definitely a sequel in spirit, or, y'know, a return to a set-up that Weir knows works. Which to be clear I think is a totally valid choice - he gets to play with a fun premise, and write a book that will entertain millions of people! Win-win! I was one of those people! I got briefly bogged down somewhere around 75% but the whole thing up to that arc and after was extremely slickly readable, hard to switch away from. (I'm dealing with my library avalanche by reading simultaneously rather than sequentially, it suits my attention span.) Do I think it was one of the six best sff novels this year? No. But does it surprise me that it was also one of the six most popular sff novels this year? Also no. Do I think it can win, I don't know, I'm not going to try to predict anything until I've finished Light from Uncommon Stars. It is definitely on the very-old-school "omnicompetent geekboy does a lot of math, discovers some fun unobtainium and plays with various implications" end of the sff spectrum - think Have Spacesuit Will Travel or various Asimov short stories - and I feel like that's not so much Hugo voters' favorite thing these days, maybe. But it is fun.